Quotes from Hilary Mantel

England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors' covenant; peace is what they offer.

Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, inbuilt, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.

If he were to counsel Anna, it would be to patience. The dowager Katherine won the admiration of all, when she sat smiling by the king she supposed her husband, through hours of court ceremonies, hours which stretched into years. Never was she seen with tears on her cheeks, or an angry frown.

Full bellies breed gentle manners. A pinch of famine makes monsters.(Bringing up the bodies,pg 36)

The living result of the queen's labors is the diminutive Mary—not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one.

If he were to counsel Anna, it would be to patience. The dowager Katherine won the admiration of all, when she sat smiling by the king she supposed her husband, through hours of court ceremonies, hours which stretched into years. Never was she seen with tears on her cheeks, or an angry frown. 'Yes,' Bess says, 'Katherine was a great pattern for womanhood. She died alone and friendless, did she not?

You start out, you start talking, you don't even know what you're going to say. You don't even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don't know anything. Then suddenly you do know you have to walk blind and you walk slap into the truth.

Every possession is a loss

The head inclines; the cardinal says, in those honeyed tones, famous from here to Vienna, 'So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.' 'Filthy.' He sits down. 'Weather. People. Manners. Morals.

Paper reassures me, its touch. It's what you respect.

Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes.

History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.

In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it's Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it's crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It's climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.

People say, "loss," she reflected, but they do not know what innocence is like. Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is armour; and she felt already clad.

Cavendish jolts up, riding knee-to-knee. 'His reliquary!' George is upset, astonished. 'To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!' 'We'll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St Peter's thumbprint, to say they're genuine.

Do you know why they say, 'There's no smoke without fire?' It's not just to give encouragement to people who like fires.

It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters. When

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

Do you know why they say, 'There's no smoke without fire?' It's not just to give encouragement to people who like fires. It's a statement about the danger of chimneys, but also about the courts of kings—or any space where trapped air circulates, choking on itself.

Once the king had grasped what he was being told, he had shouted at the top of his voice that the business should be kept quiet.

Maximilien, cerca di imparare questa verità», disse padre Herivaux, «gli uomini per la maggior parte sono pigri e ti valuteranno secondo la considerazione che tu hai di te stesso. Assicurati dunque che sia alta».

Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates.